Architects and designers as stakeholder managers
The architecture, or design has a number of stakeholders who each have a set of needs.
| Who | Description | Relationship |
| Business Owner | The customer we are working for. This is where the needs come from. | This business owner is mostly connected to the product owner, but a number of NFRs will come to the architect through this connection, such as performance needs |
| Product Owner | The person who has the primary relationship with the business owner owns the product backlog. | The product owner prioritises all work, including the enablers. The architects need to ensure that the stories for enablers are prioritised. |
| Team Members | The people who make it happen. This is where the architecture is implemented | The team needs to be able to access the architect easily for regular conversations regarding the platform. The team will demo the enabler stories back to the architect. |
| Operations
(DevOps) |
The people who make the system available to real users | The platform used is owned and operated by DevOps. a number of NFRs will be defined here along with the need for many discussions about the platform |
| External Architects | The peers of the architect in the customer’s organisation | These people will want to ensure that the work fits into the current or planned platform. There will be a number of NFRs sourced here. |
| Auditors | These are the people who audit and otherwise govern aspects of the platform | The architects and designers will often need to show compliance to external standards and policies. These checks are often done through showing traceability or other checks. |
Knowing your stakeholder is the beginning. Keeping them informed and updated is the next steps. We tend to use a quadrant view to analyse our stakeholders, something like the following.
Here our stakeholders are grouped in ways that help us understand how we will interact with them. Will we communicate on a daily basis or is the quarterly update through our website sufficient? We should be able to provide a number of means of communication depending on the type of stakeholder we are discussing.
A communications plan is sometimes a good idea. If the ceremony you are working with is low, you may be able to simply speak toi your stakeholder on a regular basis. But with a large value stream and a higher need for ceremony a more formal plan is desirable.
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